Rami's Readings #92 - š„ Meta, OpenAI, and Alibaba š
The latest on AI, LLMs, Meta, OpenAI, Qwen2, Encrypted Messaging, SaaS, Data Centers, and more.
Welcome to Ramiās Readings #92 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
ApƩro & Intellect Is Coming to Seattle and MontrƩal!
ApĆ©ro & Intellect is a curated series of intimate gatherings discussing Artificial Intelligence designed to stimulate both your mind and your palate. I am pleased to announce ApĆ©ro & Intellect #11 will take place in š Seattle on Sunday, December 15th, 2024 at 12pm. First time in Seattle!
ApĆ©ro & Intellect #12 will take place in āļø MontrĆ©al on Saturday, December 28th, 2024 at 11:30am. It will be fun!
#10 in NYC is sold out.
'Tis the season for new model releases! š I am loving this spirit!
š¤ AI Reads
Meta Released Llama 3.3! š„š„š„
Notes: An awesome release! Effectively, Meta shrunk the size of their 405B model to 70B. Yesterday, I managed to run the model on my local machine. It doesnāt fit on a single RTX 4090 GPU and inference is slow, but itās still usable. My CPU shuttles a ton of data back and forth between the RAM and GPU, but againā¦ Usable! So far, itās the best #EdgeAI model Iāve tested on my private benchmark. It solved a complex question that tripped up every other model: updating a Monte Carlo simulation written in Python to include a Sharpe Ratio calculation. (You should make your own evaluation too.) Other reads: HuggingFace. VentureBeat. Groq (It is premature to say that the scaling laws are dead, but still a good read).
OpenAI Launched ChatGPT Pro
Notes: I can imagine my MIT marketing professor, Catherine Tucker, agrees with this new pricing level. It seems more aligned with value pricing as opposed to cost pricing: 200$/month!
New Qwen2 Vision Model Released
Notes: Another state-of-the-art Vision Model that fits on a high-end local PC (72B parameters). Alibaba is on š„!
Open Source AI Model Comparison
Notes: Neat website for ranking and comparing models. Not super useful as you should be evaluating models with your own benchmarks, but it helps with discovery of models in roughly the same performance category.
Where Enterprise AI is Headed
Notes: Great read from Cohere š. Recently, Cohere received a $240 million CAD investment to scale up AI compute in Canada. šØš¦
Probabilistic Weather Forecasting With Machine Learning
Notes: Weather forecasting is more important than most people realize.
Minja: A Minimalistic C++ Jinja Templating Engine For Large Language Model Chat Templates
Notes: Neat project! You donāt need full Jinja feature support for chat templates, so this is a nice small implementation.
š¼ Business Reads
US Officials Recommend Encrypted Messaging To Evade Hackers In Telecom Networks
Notes: I hope everyone now understands why there should be no mandated backdoors in software encryption. Backstory in case you missed it.
Is SaaS Dead with AI?
TLDR: No. Still worth a read.
Dubai Billionaire Plans to Build Data Centers Across Asia
Notes: Thailand makes sense as an investment destination.
Clearās Dominance in Airports Could Be Coming to an End
Notes: I do use Clear with TSA Precheck, but I am skeptical they have a sustainable business. I have a free membership through my Amex travel card.
Buy āMagnificent Sevenā on Corrections, NYUās Damodaran Says
Notes: Same professors that maintains the Betas list I shared previously.
Signing off from New York City.